What should raise a couple of eyebrows is when a developer who specializes in these shelters is asked if he is being paranoid. He asks if the government is paranoid because they have been feverishly building these shelters in the last ten years. And he knows this because they use the same engineers.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Just checking in.

Made a break out of town.

Hi folks. It has been a awhile. I have been taking care of some personal business so I have been unable to blog and I think it will be awhile before I can pop in regularly. Before I leave, I would like to comment on this article.

This is really oversimplifying the situation which is surprising since this was published in the New York Times.

This real estate market is f**ked up for a variety of reasons which include sellers, lenders, foreclosures and the economy. To simply place the blame on one group is just plain stupid.

Which leads me to my next completely unscientific gut feeling. We are going to get hit again by the real estate market. The cause will be the consequences of the double dip and it will also be caused by something that none of us saw coming.

Even the subject of the article admits he understands why people are pissed off at him. So why should they be upset about the storm of negative comments they are getting? Do they think that people would hoist them on their shoulders and parade them all over town?

The Pemberton and Reboyras gamed the system and are now reaping the benefits. But by admitting what they have done in public they have only themselves to blame for the backlash.

They are either ignorant, stupid or just don't care about their surroundings. What they should have done is shut the f**k up. Because by announcing what they did is tantamount of eating an ice cream cone in front of a group of starving children.

In times like this, good fortune, and I use the term loosely for what Pemberton and Reboyras did, is not something one should show to the world. Because one person's cause for joy is another person's cause for resentment. And there is a lot of resentment in the world.

It happens all the time where people have to choose between covering the fee or the capital outlays for renting an apartment. Whether they don't have the money or just don't want to give it up, this current economic climate does not give them any incentive to pay up.

Of course the broker are not to crazy about that. So what does broker do? Kill the deal. I'm serious. They cut their nose to spite their face. If they can't get theirs, why should anyone else.

Do landlords care about this? It depends on the landlords. If the landlord has armies of qualified renters knocking down their doors, they are not going to care. If the bank is knocking on their doors asking about the rent roll, it is likely they will be pissed at their broker.

What will determine how much of a haircut rental brokers will get is if they are acting as a barriers of entry for landlords because they are unable to collect their fees. Once that happens, the s**t is really going to hit the fan.

That is when these alternative sites will start to pick up more steam and then someone decides to pull a Firefox and create a free site that lists all the rental buildings in Manhattan. Which is entirely feasible. All the information is out there and all it takes is a couple of programmers, a case of red bull and renter's rage to consolidate it all in a site that is accessible to the public. When that day comes, there will be blood on the streets.

1. Banks are in the lending business not the real estate business. They are not landlords. The last thing a bank wants to do is take over a property because it costs too much to manage it and get rid of it.

2. The foreclosure process is not an immediate. Even before the meltdown, there were always a ton of hoops a lender had to go through to foreclose on a house.

3. Banks are overwhelmed by the copious amount of homeowners in default. They obviously did not have the proper system set up to deal with it.

4. The new regulations in foreclosure is making the process more difficult for lenders.

5. People are pissed as f**k.

There is a massive state of rage amongst the have nots about being screwed over. And a lot of them have been.

Two years ago, his doorbell rang, and two men from Wells Fargo offered to consolidate his consumer loans into a low-cost mortgage.

“I thought, ‘This is great! ’ ” Mr. Banks says. “When you have four kids, college expenses, you look for any savings.”

What those men did not tell Mr. Banks, he says (and Ms. Thomas, who studied his case, confirms), is that his new mortgage had an adjustable rate. When it reset last year, his payment jumped to $1,700 from $1,200.

This is just one of millions of stories of people being taken of advantage of. And there are millions of stories of people making really bad life decisions.